ALL THE NEWS

Body of knowledge

The average American goes to the toilet (for one reason or another) six times a day.

Number cruncher

A Panera restaurant tomato and mozzarella panini on ciabatta bread (170 grams) contains 370 calories, 117 from fat. It has 13 grams of total fat or 20 percent of the recommended total fat intake for a 2,000-calorie daily diet.

5 – Times more likely an overweight or obese preschooler is to become an overweight or obese adult than a normal-weight child

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Phobia of the week

Verbophobia – fear of words

Medical history

This week in 1856, Gail Borden of Brooklyn, NY, patented his for condensed milk, which allowed for long periods of storage and made milk much more available in large cities of his time. The Borden company advertised “milk from contented cows” and became one of the largest dairy product concerns in the world. It still is.

Is confusion ensured?

Over the next few months, much of the public discussion about Obamacare will concern how to adequately explain it to consumers, especially those getting health insurance for the first time.

But maybe there’s a bigger problem: A new set of multi-university surveys reports that many Americans who already have health insurance don’t understand how their plans work – even when they think they do. The findings are published in the Journal of Health Economics.

Participants were assessed on their knowledge of four basic traditional insurance concepts: deductible, copay, co-insurance and out-of-pocket maximum. While the vast majority expressed confidence in their insurance knowledge, researchers found that only 14 percent accurately understood all four concepts.

The researchers said the findings are worrisome, in no small part because the changing face of healthcare will increasingly depend upon consumers making well-informed comparisons and choices between differing healthcare plans.

“It is strange, in my opinion, that the insurance market has evolved so, that so few individuals understand the fundamentals of the medical insurance plans they are insured under,” said George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon and one of the study authors.

“Insurance plans incorporate all sorts of incentives designed to encourage customers to make specific types of decisions. What is the likelihood that they are going to respond to these incentives if they can’t understand the most basic elements of plan design?”

Curtain calls

James Otis, Jr. (1725-1783) was a lawyer in colonial Massachusetts and early advocate of the American revolution, coining the phrase “taxation without representation is tyranny.” Reportedly, he often told friends and family that when his time came he hoped “God Almighty in his righteous providence” would smite him dead with a “flash of lightning.”